YOU CAN'T BE TOO CAREFUL 65

you were to bury whatever talent you had ever possessed.
Respectful but irresponsible dependence ; " ordering your-
self lowly and reverently to all your betters ", as the dear
old catechism puts it; that was the feudal idea.

Before his mother's death, Edward Albert had been in-
duced to contemplate the problem of his social anchorage
so far as to listen to a suggestion made by one of her friends
that a Gas Works Clerk was one of the soundest possible
positions to which a modest young Believer might aspire.
To qualify for such a place in the world, he heard the lady say
it was best to go twice a week to the evening classes of the
Imperial College of Commercial Science for their Course of
Training in Business Methods. They issued certificates of
proficiency in all the clerkly arts, pr6cis and book-keeping by
single and double entry, commercial arithmetic, mensuration,
long hand and shorthand. Elementary French—not French
but Elementary French, whatever that may mean. This
training was specially adapted to turning a crude human
being into a Gas Works Clerk, and indeed she knew as a fact
that the gas works people came to the College and accepted
its certificates unquestioningly. The College, according
to its copious prospectus, engaged in many other activities,
the Lower Division Civil Service, London Matriculation
and so on, but it was the Gas Works Clerk, one particular
case she had known, that had seized upon the informant's
imagination. He was such a nice young man.

Edward Albert listened carelessly at first and then atten-
tively, and reflected. The College was situated in Kentish
Town ; its hoarding made a brave show, and what he saw
there was not so much the prospect of gumming himself down
firmly as a Gas Works Clerk, as of going in the evening,
unwatched and uncontrolled, through the magic of the lit
streets to the college. One could start early and arrive late ;
he was already an adept in such intercalary freedoms. He had
still much of the lingering levity of boyhood and the Hidden
Hand in his make up*

Then he would be able to loiter on his way outside the
glittering temptations of the cinema theatre. He could stop